This is more of the insanity the site’s title refers to, only this is the colossal, beyond belief type of insanity.

I have to laugh at this article from Telegraph.co.uk. The author matter-of-factly writes about the monumental quantities of various kinds of power generating equipment that will have to be installed and completely ignores the staggering costs of it all.

Britain has some very lofty goals when it comes to reducing their carbon footprint. If they’re to achieve the goals they have set…

Every car on the road will need to be electric and there will be solar panels on every home, 10,000 wind turbines onshore and 40 new nuclear power stations if the Government is to stand a chance of meeting strict climate change targets, engineers have warned.

The report assumed that the maximum level of renewable electricity will be installed including 9,600 wind turbines on land and a further 10,000 turbines at sea. The Severn Barrage will have to go ahead as will as 1,000 miles of wave machines and further installations for tidal power. Most of the country’s 25 milliion households will have to install solar papenls and scrap boilers in favour of heat pumps that take heat of of the air or the ground.

I did a little research on the Internet and arrived at the following figures using US Dollars. Hopefully my math is correct…

The average cost of a nuclear power plant at $10 billion. They want 40 of them, so that’s about $400 billion.

There are about 17 million cars on the road in the UK. NADA puts the average cost of a car in the US at $28,400. (Couldn’t find one for the UK). Using this figure, replacing all 17 million cars at $28,400 that totals $482.8 billion. Based on electric car prices (Chevy Volt for example), I’d say that’s a conservative figure.

A good solar panel system for a house will run about $20,000. Take the 25 million households in the UK and that totals up to another $500 billion.

Replacing boilers with heat pumps seems to be going for about $5,000 per house x 25 million = $1.25 billion.

One commercial scale wind turbine runs about $3.5 million installed. Take that times 20,000 and you get $70 billion.

$650,000 per generator to manufacture. Per the article they’ll need 1,000 miles of wave machines. I have no clue how many per mile will be installed (can’t find anyting online), but if we just put one per mile that would be 1,000 of them. Let’s say $1 million per installed and you have another $1 billion. (Sounds cheap to me but since I can’t find any more info we’ll go with that).

Now for the low power coal or nuclear power plants, lets take coal. A coal plant is about $1.83 billion for a regular one. Add carbon capture to it and I’ll take a wild guess and say $3 billion. They will need 40 of those, so that is another $120 billion.

This totals to a staggering $1.58 trillion, rounded off. I don’t think that will be all that’s involved, either.

If you switch to all electric cars, you have to add in the cost of putting plugs in for car charging stations all over the UK. You will also have the cost of removing or altering 9,271 gas stations, and the cost of scrapping 17 million cars. They will have to be scrapped because they’ll basically be useless unless someone comes out with a nifty kit to convert from petrol to electric.

The main goal of this is to reduce carbon, right? Now can you imagine the carbon footprint of converting 25 million houses to solar, switching 25 million boilers t0 heat pumps, building 17 million electric cars, building 40 nuclear power plants, building 40 coal power plants, building and installing charging stations all over the country, scrapping 17 million cars, scrapping 9,271 gas stations and building and installing 1,000 or so wave generated power plants?

Can you imagine the eyesore of 20,000 wind turbines and 1,000 wave generators? Can you imagine the noise created by 20,000 wind turbines? Not to mention that with all those wind machines I wonder how much longer birds would be left in Britain, as they’d all be chopped to pieces. Is this really going to lower the carbon footprint? I certainly have to wonder if after all is said and done, and you take all this into consideration, that it might not actually increase the carbon footprint?

Let’s go global now. Say the UK is about an average size country. (I have no clue and I’m not about to figure it out if you want to, be my guest), and that $1.58 trillion per country would be about average.

Depending upon the resource, there are about 195 independent countries in the world today. Now we have UK sized ones, huge ones like the United States, China, Russia, and small ones like Monaco, Switzerland, etc.

Take that $1.58 trillion, multiply it by 195 and that my friends, totals to about $308 trillion dollars! Based on what I see, if a government gets involved (and I don’t care what one, they’re all alike on spending) you could probably be realistic by at least doubling that to $616 trillion dollars. An insane sum indeed.